Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan
THE AGILE MANIFESTO
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Contents
1. Agile Scrum 3
2. The benefits of Agile Scrum 3
3. Why Is It Called Scrum? 4
4. How does Scrum Work? 5
5. Three technical versions of agile thinking in business 7
5.1 Agile Software 7
5.2 Agile Data 8
5.3 Agile Project Management 9
6. Agile methods vs Waterfall 10
7. Agile jobs statistics 11
Modern times and current market demands require flexibility, delivering high quality products, keeping costs low and the time to deliver short. This demands a new approach. The need for such a different approach is why many companies move away from the traditional waterfall methodology to adopt the Agile approach.
Agile development is an approach to managing teams and projects which focuses on continuous improvement, scope flexibility, team input and delivering essential quality products. Scrum is the most well-known and widely adopted Agile method. While Scrum originated as a methodology for software development, the principles are widely applicable and it is increasingly being used in other types of projects. Within Scrum, development takes place in small steps called Sprints. Scrum practices include establishing cross-functional and self-managed teams that produce a working deliverable at the end of each sprint.
Because of the flexible way of working, there is constantly room to adjust the product or to change priorities half way through a project. In the end the project will result in a high-quality product that is closely aligned to the clients’ wishes and expectations. Agile Scrum is different in other respects as well: there are no long or endless meetings and no irrelevant documentation. Agile teams organize themselves and stakeholders are involved in a timely fashion.
All stakeholders benefit when using Agile Scrum; the team because of the clearly defined roles, interaction and flexibility. Management because the team runs itself and the members are motivated and committed. The stakeholders because they are constantly up to date. And the product owner because (s)he gets what (s)he ordered.
• Customer satisfaction: Agile Scrum facilitates changing customer requirements. The flexible way of working allows for changing demands and new features. Changes can easily be facilitated, without disrupting the project flow or affecting the team’s morale.
• Transparency: one of the Agile Scrum principles is active ‘user’ and/or product owner involvement. The progress, status, changes are all visible so that it is clear at all times what the end product will be like. This way, expectations are effectively managed.
• High Quality & Low Risk: testing is integrated throughout the project so that any quality issues can be detected and addressed at an early stage. The Sprints are followed by a review which allows the team to reflect on the previous sprint and discuss improvements for the next. This allows for adjustments according to the client’s wishes.
1. Agile Scrum
Source: http://stateofagile.versionone.com/why-agile/
TOP 3 REASONS TO ADOPT AGILE (2014)
Not important at all Somewhat important Very important Highest importance
Accelerate time to market 3% 21% 43% 32%
Manage changing priorities 3% 17% 54% 27%
Better Align IT/ Business 9% 27% 42% 23%
Increase productivity 3% 24% 55% 19%
Project visibility 9% 30% 47% 15%
Enhance software quality 6% 28% 48% 18%
Reduce risk 6% 35% 47% 12%
Simplify development process 11% 36% 45% 8%
Reduce cost 15% 40% 35% 10%
Improve team morale 14% 41% 38% 7%
Enhance software maintainability/extensibility 13% 40% 40% 7%
Improve/ increase engineering discipline 15% 45% 36% 5%
Manage distributed teams 34% 37% 25% 4%
32%
ACCELERATED TIME TO MARKET27%
EASILY MANAGE CHANGING PRIORITIES23%
BETTER ALLIGN IT & BUSINESS
When Jeff Sutherland created the scrum process in 1993, he borrowed the term “scrum” from an analogy put forth in a 1986 study by Takeuchi and Nonaka, published in the Harvard Business Review. In that study, Takeuchi and Nonaka compare high-performing, cross-functional teams to the scrum formation used by Rugby teams.
Scrum is the leading agile development methodology, used by Fortune 500 companies around the world. The Scrum Alliance exists to transform the way we tackle complex projects, bringing the Scrum framework and agile principles beyond software development to the broader world of work.
Source: Scrum.org Source: www.scrumalliance.org
Building complex products for customers is an inherently difficult task. Scrum provides structure to allow teams to deal with that difficulty. However, the fundamental process is incredibly simple, and at its core is governed by 3 primary roles.
• Product Owners determine what needs to be built in the next 30 days or less.
• Development Teams build what is needed in 30 days (or less), and then demonstrate what they have built. Based on this demonstration, the Product Owner determines what to build next.
• Scrum Masters ensure this process happens as smoothly as possible, and continually help improve the process, the team and the product being created.
While this is an incredibly simplified view of how Scrum works, it captures the essence of this highly productive approach for team collaboration and product development.
Software-Defined Applications and Infrastructure
Agile programming of everything from applications to basic infrastructure is essential to enable organizations to deliver the flexibility required to make the digital business work. Software-defined networking, storage, data centers and security are maturing. Cloud services are software-configurable through API calls, and applications, too, increasingly have rich APIs to access their function and content programmatically. To deal with the rapidly changing demands of digital business and scale systems up — or down — rapidly, computing has to move away from static to dynamic models. Rules, models and code that can dynamically assemble and configure all of the elements needed from the network through the application are needed.
Agile programming is named by Gartner as one of the Strategic Technology trends for 2015
5. Three technical versions of agile thinking in business
5.1 Agile Software
The group of software experts that first defined agile development did so in a publication called the Agile Manifesto, its title perhaps echoing Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto.
Thirteen years on, the revolution which begun in a Utah hotel is gathering pace. Major commercial software developers, including Microsoft and Google, employ tens of thousands of programmers working to agile development principles. Agile development is about breaking down a software project into a series of steps, called sprints, each of which result in usable code. Sprints lasting a few weeks include rapid testing and correction of code with the close involvement of the eventual user of the software.
Techniques for promoting teamwork are at the heart of agile development. Daily meetings, chaired by so-called scrum masters and sometimes conducted standing up, are held to review progress and set targets. Progress is often charted on large wall displays called radiators, which all team members can see.
It is all very different from the traditional waterfall approach in which an entire project is planned and timetabled from the outset and executed in a sequential manner. “In the UK, waterfall is still the predominant method for software development, but agile is coming up fast,” says Gordon Morrison, director of technology for government at TechUK, the trade body for high-technology companies. “In waterfall you are fixing the scope and varying the time; with agile you are varying the scope and fixing the time. You use agile when you want to develop software, but you are not 100 per cent sure of the outcome.”
Nowhere in the UK has agile development been embraced as enthusiastically as in central government and with good reason. For years billions of pounds have been squandered on IT projects that were never completed. Earlier this year, the Government Digital Service demonstrated 25 online services that had been developed using agile techniques and celebrated the end of ‘big IT’.
However, some civil servants remain to be convinced. HM Revenue and Customs has been criticised by the National Audit Office for failing to adopt agile techniques in its development of the Universal Credit tax system.
5.2 Agile Data
Price comparison website CompareTheMarket. com cut the time it took to develop new services a thousand-fold by adopting a more agile approach to data.
Instead of having to wait for information to be downloaded from a data warehouse, business managers can access it immediately, enabling the company to reduce the time it takes to add new features to a site from three weeks to 30 minutes. Database management has been a conservative business with data owners understandably reluctant to do anything that might jeopardise the accuracy and security of their data, the lifeblood of their enterprises.
However, circumstances are forcing their hand. The volume of data generated by businesses is growing at 40 per cent a year, according to research company IDC. The company forecasts that with the amount of data doubling every two years, databases will be bulging with 44 trillion gigabytes of data by 2020.
That growth is being driven by an upsurge in online activity and new types of data gathered from mobile devices and sensors linked to the internet of things. This data tends to be unstructured and sometimes inaccurate, but often needs to be dealt with in real time. Companies have had to find more agile ways of handling the data.
A first step is to reduce duplicated data and to pack it more tightly using techniques such as virtualisation and data compression. The parallel and in-memory processing techniques associated with Hadoop and NoSQL database software can relieve conventional data warehouses of the burden of handling large datasets.
Chief information officers (CIOs) are increasingly turning to the cloud, transferring the chore of storing and managing information to service companies for all but the most business-critical processes. Moving to the cloud also allows them to be much more responsive to changing circumstances, turning facilities on and off as required. In addition, analytics as a service enables CIOs to mine information and develop rapid prototypes of new services.
“As many organisations in the industry move towards a model of continuous delivery, our database models must be designed to support the change,” concludes database expert Dan Wood. “There really is no intrinsic difference between application code and databases.”
5.3 Agile Project Management
The ideas behind agile software development have influenced the management of a wide variety of engineering, IT and product-development projects.
Agile managers adopt a flexible and interactive style of management that is particularly suited to small- scale projects or elements of larger work programmes, which are complicated and when outcomes are difficult to predict. As in software development, agile managers are people focused. They assemble teams of experts, customers and suppliers to work incrementally, testing and refining their work in a process of continuous improvement.
Collaborative working is to the fore with regular meetings to review progress, discuss problems and find solutions. “This approach can be leveraged effectively for non-software products and for project management in general, especially in areas of innovation and uncertainty,” says Jean-Loup Richet, research fellow at the French business school ESSEC. “The end result is a product or project that best meets current customer needs, and is delivered with minimal costs, waste and time, enabling companies to achieve bottom-line gains earlier than via traditional approaches.”
There are strong similarities between agile management techniques and methodologies such as lean, kanban and six sigma, which have been applied with great success by manufacturing companies. Unipart Group, for example, has built its manufacturing and logistics business round a methodology called the Unipart Way.
“The Unipart Way, our proprietary interpretation of agile, is the fundamental element of our competitive edge,” says Frank Nigriello, Unipart’s director of corporate affairs. “It is the philosophy that allows us to do more for our customers, and to engage all our people in innovation and problem-solving.”
Close study of picking, packaging and packing techniques has considerably cut the time it takes to dispatch orders in logistics. Warehouses run by Unipart sport communications centres were performance statistics, targets and lists of problems to be sorted are displayed on boards. Staff attend daily meetings at the centres, and also take part in quality circles and receive instruction at onsite training centres. And it works. For example, Unipart has been able to cut the time to diagnose faults in Sky set-top boxes by 90 per cent.
6. Agile methods vs Waterfall
Source: Liquidplanner.com
Source: The CHAOS Manifesto, The Standish Group 2012
7. Agile jobs statistics
8. Agile Scrum Competitors
Characteristics
• Attending a course for PSM I and PSM II not required
• Courses and examinations in English
• Courses mainly available in US and UK
Characteristics
• Working experience as a prerequisite
• Course of 21 contact hours
PMI Agile Certified
Practitioner (PMI-ACP®) Professional SCRUM
Master (PSM II) Professional SCRUM Product Owner II
Professional SCRUM
Master (PSM I) Professional SCRUM Product Owner I
Professional SCRUM Developer EXIN Agile Scrum
Master
EXIN Agile Scrum Foundation
Characteristics
• Foundation level for all involved in a Scrum team
• Advanced level contains
• Practical Assignments
• Foundation and Master exams in 6 languages (Dutch, English, French, Japanese, LA Spanish, Portuguese)
Characteristics
• For CSM a 2-day course by a CST is required
• Certication model requires a license agreement and Scrum Alliance membership (with fee)
• Certification renewal every two years • Examination in English
• Exam price included in training price
AGILE SCRUM COMPETITORS
Certified Scrum
Professional® (CSP)
Certified Scrum Product
Owner® (CSPO)
Certified ScrumMaster®
(CSM) Certified Scrum Developer® (CSD)
Certified Scrum
Coach® (CSC) Certified Scrum Trainer® (CST)
30.0% 25.0% 20.0% 15.0% 10.0% 5.0% 0.0% Jul Jan Jul Jan Jul Jan Jul Jan Jul Jan Jul Jan Jul Jan Jul Jan Jul Jan Jul Jan Jul 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 Jan
This chart provides the 3-month moving total of permanent IT jobs citing Agile Software Development within the UK as a
proportion of the total demand within the Prosesses & Methodologies category.
